Stranger Mouths by Heather Cox

Stranger Mouths

There are rooms where nothing happensand corners where a body can beforgotten, without intention. Here,desire crowds the air. In most places,you cannot explain to a stranger how muchyou love them, and I am tired of pretendingto half-love you all day long. Is there an islandfor hearts like engines? For mouthslike engines? For engines like a pillowcaseof feathers? In messages, I use irrationalsymbols as a way to mute my speech.Remembering all the love letters my tonguewrote in the dim lit mouths of othersis an unrewarding archive, a lightningbug blink: hours beneath lampshade runningtaste buds against my teeth. You can drinkyour own language, it doesn’t mean you eat.Just because I loved you once, doesn’t meanI’ll love you again (though I will). I findnotes folded within their own geometryand try to decipher my previous angle.I fill a tin bucket with a year’s worthof want, but the rain washes nothingaway. I try my hand at erasure:There are rooms stranger, mouthslike feathers, letters you loved.There are forests with downed limbsobstructing the trail. There are burrowsin the bark the woodpeckerwill never fill with her hungry beak.

Heather Cox edits Ghost Ocean Magazine and the handmade chapbook press Tree Light Books. Her work has been published in Barrelhouse, Indiana Review, Chicago Review of Books, PANK, Pinwheel, Nightblock, and elsewhere. A Luminarts Fellow, Heather lives in Colorado and can be found online at looklookhere.tumblr.com.